Features - QOTW: How would you improve the PC?

[akinkivilcim]

I would make it more like a console with a set mouse a set display and a set keyboard and a set operating system where its like a console you can have all your stuff on there but when you play your game and you have all your required stuff should able to play with no problems... Like a console

[ET3D]

What I would like is a pocketable PC which links wirelessly to my TV or monitor, keyboard, etc., and to an augmented reality display which will be its standard display. It will connect to a home server which will provide storage and processing power when needed.

[wasabi]

Go for big screens for a proper desktop 'experience'.

Preinstalled bloatware being removed and stop the obsession with trying to be a tablet. I just decided yesterday to abandon the Nexus 7 and get a netbook again. So I got a nice little 2nd hand Samsung NC110 with win7 preinstalled. It was a vicious cycle because the thing was so slow and crashy at factory default it took ages to get out of the no responding messages while ridding it of bloat. Took me about 2 hours to make the machine usable endlessly deinstalling junk that Samsung had put on there. It was a vicious cycle because the thing was so slow and crashy at factory default it took ages to get out of the 'not responding' messages while ridding it of bloat.

Better now with Chrome and Windows updates done. With a RAM upgrade and maybe a SSD the thing will be great.

[0iD]

For me it's all the things PC computing has been striving for since invention. Smaller size, faster processing, better quality GFX less power and less heat.

Still, gotta love the old beige steel full tower cases of yester-year that kept the office warm in the winter and made us sweat our nuts off in the summer. Having to leave the side off of the case and stand a desk fan next-to it. Happy halcyon days

[Top_gun]

1) 8K monitor

2) Effective silent cooling on a palm size PC

3) Desktop hub featuring a range of USB ports, displayport and headphone jack

4) PC to provide power and connectivity to monitor and desktop hub via a single displayport or something similar for streamlined cable management

one power socket------PC------desktop hub------monitor (just three cables)

5) Energy efficient PC which doesn't use more than 5 watts peak to compete with energy efficient tablets

[Frankenfurter]

Break the garden walls down, open up development on all OSes and give me a non-invasive neural interface... Without Facebook stealing my brain data.

I don't ask for much.

[rahul4557]

I would like to see systems like J.A.R.V.I.S. the ones showed in iron man movie series, or something like that which can help physical disabled persons to use a computer.
from developing programs to building hardware (using robots) which would be possible to a physically disabled person without any other persons help and make them independent.

[crossy]

Oh my lord, were do I start?
1. Get rid of the constant plethora of sockets - Intel especially need a good slap on the head for the 2110, 1155, 1156 nonsense.
2. Persuade Microsoft to open source large parts of Windows. I just love the idea that some genius could replace the Windows8 UI with one that actually was more productive than the Windows7 one. The best parts of the "PC" as we know it are the parts where companies can compete.
3. Give Microsoft a BIG cheque to make Windows9 a complete rewrite - you know - remove as much of that crufty old code that's causing those BSOD's. Either than or introduce fines for producing sub-standard drivers ... corporate negligence ... and apply those to the CEO's etc personally.
4. Highly modular PC's - no screwdrivers required;
5. New user interfaces. I really had an inexplicable liking for that "hologram" in SeaQuest DSV, couple that with the kind of tech that you see on "Agents of SHIELD" and "Hawaii 5-0" and others. Kinect/Leap are getting there perhaps - but what I'd like at this precise moment is some kind of "roller blind" screen where I can treat windows like they're bits of paper on a real desk - slide 'em, grab 'em etc.
6. Hire a hitman to travel the world to slap any journalist who keeps on with this "omg, the PC is dead" nonsense. The "PC" is just that - a Personal Computer - and if that eventually morphs into something that you can undock and put in your pocket for most uses then fine. Personally I still think that the "needs" of overclockers, tinkerers and games fanatics mean that "ye olde tower" PC is going to be with us for a good while longer. Plus ca change...?
7. Kind of a continuation of #6 to be honest. I'd like to see some kind of tablet PC that could dock with a desktop as a glorified flash drive. So your apps and local files would be on the tablet and you could dock with whatever you needed. So if you needed a laptop then a keyboard dock - a la Asus Transformer. If you wanted an uber-powerful gaming rig then dock into a "desktop" where the tablet's processor would become merely a co-processor to the desktop's multicore, high TDP processor, and the tablet's graphics get superseded by the desktop's SLI/Crossfire setup.
8. Work out a way to backup a PC that's actually usable. How many folks out there can say with some certainty that they're happy with their backups? We've now got 5TB drives with no real way to back 'em up - except to another drive. Come on IBM etc - where's those holocubes you promised us years ago?

Preinstalled bloatware being removed and stop the obsession with trying to be a tablet. I just decided yesterday to abandon the Nexus 7 and get a netbook again. So I got a nice little 2nd hand Samsung NC110 with win7 preinstalled. It was a vicious cycle because the thing was so slow and crashy at factory default it took ages to get out of the no responding messages while ridding it of bloat.
Better now with Chrome and Windows updates done. With a RAM upgrade and maybe a SSD the thing will be great.

Had the same issue - but I'm too impatient to bother with spending a day+ unSamsung'ing a device. I put Linux Mint on the one I got for el kid and job done. Certainly good enough to do the various things you'd use a small-form-factor portable for. RAM and SSD upgrades? Definitely a good idea - especially the SSD since it's going to boost your battery life.

Never mind Apple suing Samsung over yet more of their (highly dubious?) patents. Personally, I think we're due a class action lawsuit for all the time and grief that Samsung's caused us, the consumer, with their unnecessary bloatware. ChatON, etc.

[DanceswithUnix]

3. Give Microsoft a BIG cheque to make Windows9 a complete rewrite - you know - remove as much of that crufty old code that's causing those BSOD's. Either than or introduce fines for producing sub-standard drivers ... corporate negligence ... and apply those to the CEO's etc personally.

Microsoft have had more money to write that big cheque than anyone else. They already had one complete rewrite with WindowsNT, and another with Windows CE. If they haven't got it right by now, then I think your big cheque would be good money after bad.

I think you would be better off writing the cheque to Red Hat or Debian. Starting with performance and stability and adding bling would be so much easier than the other way around.

[crossy]

Er, that's kind of how a lot of people work now. Although without your technically awkward doubling up of hardware. I dock / undock my super lightweight laptop and can grab any of my other devices and continue working without having to dock them. Wireless was invented years ago you know.

Apologies here - I didn't explain myself that well (which is what usually happens when you're also on a teleconf listening to someone droning on about 'customer experience' and 'no-cost value add'). I'm a wireless sharer too - OneDrive and Dropbox in my case - but that only really works for data not apps. Yes, there's the ability of iTunes/Play type app stores to allow installs on multiple devices that are assigned to your shop id. What I was kind of getting at was some way to take that "desktop experience" with you. Heck, simplfying right down - I can play Call of Duty 2 on my PC, and that game's simple enough to be able to probably work on current tablet hardware. How neat would it be to take that one copy and play it where you wanted ... seamlessly! Same with Office, Photoshop, whatever.

Again, this was resolved years ago. What's wrong with backing up our data to another duplicate drive? If you think we'll be backing up mechanical discs to holodrives you're wrong. We'll be backing up our holodrives to holodrives.

Quite true. Stuff like Carbonite probably works pretty well IF you've got a good upstream connection AND you can afford the costs AND you're happy handing over control of your backups over to someone else. If one of those three predicates fail, then cloud storage/backup isn't viable - and the only option these days is pretty much a RAID'd NAS box. Which for a typical family is going to be £500+ - or put it another way, about the same price as a pretty decent laptop.

Fast connections and cloud storage solve many of your personnel issues with 'The PC'.

I'm lucky enough to have that fast connection, and no great objections to cloud storage. So yes, what you say has a lot of truth. Others aren't so lucky though.

[...]If they haven't got it right by now, then I think your big cheque would be good money after bad. I think you would be better off writing the cheque to Red Hat or Debian. Starting with performance and stability and adding bling would be so much easier than the other way around.

You're probably very correct in that. But as much as I personally like the stability of Linux (which is why it's still my main OS for day to day things), Windows ain't going away anytime soon. Plus, alas, there's still quite a few things for which a Windows program is the best answer. Interesting that you didn't mention the obvious candidate though - Canonical. Too far gone down the proprietary/bloated path?

Actually, mad thought, I really wished someone had managed to persuade Apple to allow OS X on other things than Mac's. It would have been interesting to see of that OS - OS X - could have made a sizeable dent in the Windows market share.

[DanceswithUnix]

Actually, mad thought, I really wished someone had managed to persuade Apple to allow OS X on other things than Mac's. It would have been interesting to see of that OS - OS X - could have made a sizeable dent in the Windows market share.

Nah, as I said earlier Apple are part of the problem. Unlike Microsoft they do at least make use of existing fundamental standards such as OpenGL, but they still try and wall their users in to extract as much money as possible from them. That isn't surprising, as a company's main responsibility is to maximise returns for the share holders so any benefit to the users is only an accidental by product of that. I think if you want the platform to move on, then you want to avoid the protectionist mindset.

Recent example is that people seem to want a tablet that can convert to a laptop. Asus come up with a dual Android/Windows platform, and both Google and Microsoft want it stamped out. So that platform might be a good evolutionary path, but we will never know as it isn't allowed.

They see so very short-sighted because they stand on the shoulders of lawyers.

In fact the only big PC company I can think of that I would say ever had any real ethics is IBM, and they quit the market. They also only have ethics because the US government beat it into them in the 80's, but I think it stuck.

Canonial? I briefly thought of them, but AIUI they are a downstream user of Debian. If I were going to write a big cheque, I think I would want to send it upstream to Debian. Or pay RedHat for a Fedora spin, as again they are a package source. Possibly even keep the cheque to hire a squad of developers, and put the effort in where I wanted it just like Valve are now doing. Note that I haven't used Ubuntu, but if I really was in control of a big cheque I would actually bother trying it

Perhaps what we need to move things forward is an end user equivalent of Open Compute servers. Open Desktop?

[cjs150]

1. Stop this obsession with "touch". I do not want my screen smeared with fingerprints. Start experimenting with arm waiving as in Minority Report (probably will not work but fun)

2. Heat and noise are still an issue.

3. Cheap monitors to be properly caliberated out of box.

4. My pet hate on Micro ATX cards is that PCI-E slot is too close to the bottom of memory slots when using water cooled cards.

5. Better cable management - real like the idea of a single powered SATA cable.

6. 24 pin ATX cables - please lets change this into something more usable

[iranu]

A standardised set of pins all combined into one adaptor for the front panel. My Asus mobo has a little white block you put all the front panel cables into then that slots onto the motherboard in one go. However, I'm still having to sod about with individual cables on most PCs along with my sausage fingers.

And standardised cpu coolers. Why can't they just agree on chip height for the socket and then use the 4 holes that have been around forever. That way you know that the cooler you bought 3 years ago is going to fit the mobo/cpu without any fuss. Just have the coolers rated for wattage.

Do the same with gpu cards too. Then we could buy water cooling kit for the hottest part of the PC knowing we are not going to have to change the cooling block every 2 years.

[TooNice]

Tell Intel to release a new processor every 2 years instead of every 6 months!

Eww, no. Why get stuck in long cycles when a short cycles give you the flexibility. And it's not just beneficial people who want to upgrade every 6, 12, 18 months, but also people who want to upgrade every 3 years, for instance.

[crossy]

A standardised set of pins all combined into one adaptor for the front panel. My Asus mobo has a little white block you put all the front panel cables into then that slots onto the motherboard in one go. However, I'm still having to sod about with individual cables on most PCs along with my sausage fingers.

Now you mention it - I'm going to agree. Why the heck can't other manufacturers do the same as Asus, it's a small thing I know, but doesn't half make a difference to the ease of a build - no need to go footering about with pliers/tweezers to get those tiny blocks into place. We need a standard connector!

Eww, no. Why get stuck in long cycles when a short cycles give you the flexibility. And it's not just beneficial people who want to upgrade every 6, 12, 18 months, but also people who want to upgrade every 3 months, for instance.

I almost thought you were being serious there for a minute...

[TooNice]

I was serious though I made a typo

I like to have the *choice* of buying the latest and shiniest when I upgrade. It doesn't mean that I will necessarily buy the latest and shiniest but I welcome the option to, or not to.

Now if the entire architecture changes every 6 months to make it incompatible with previous motherboard, I'd have a problem, but for just a CPU, it's not such a bad thing.